THE LINEUP: cool killer, volcanic killer, careening thru San Francisco

THE LINEUP
THE LINEUP

The 1958 film noir The Lineup plays this Saturday, July 30, on Turner Classic Movies. The villains and the final chase scene are unforgettable, as are the movie’s iconic San Francisco locations.  It’s one of my Overlooked Noirs.

Two gangsters are smuggling heroin into San Francisco, hidden in the bags of unsuspecting cruise ship passengers. When a shipment isn’t where it’s supposed to be (in a girl’s doll), the gangsters take the doll’s owner (Cindy Calloway) and her mother (Mary LaRoche) hostage and then try to hunt down the contraband in San Francisco’s underground. Will the crooks find the junk? Will they harm the hostages? Will the cops find them first? The suspense builds until the man hunt turns into a spectacular chase through San Francisco.

Richard Jaeckel and Robert Keith in THE LINEUP
Richard Jaeckel and Robert Keith in THE LINEUP

The bad guys, Julian (Robert Keith) and Dancer (Eli Wallach), really set The Lineup apart from other crime dramas of the period.  Julian is ruthless, but always controlled and strategic.  One of the most self-aware villains in cinema history, Julian says things like, “Crying’s aggressive and so’s the law. Ordinary people of your class, you don’t understand the criminal’s need for violence.” He describes his partner Dancer as “a wonderful, pure pathological study. He’s a psychopath with no inhibitions.”

Robert Keith’s son, Brian Keith, became a much bigger star in the TV series Family Affair and a host of Disney productions.  But Robert Keith was himself a fine actor, especially as a PTSD-addled colonel in Men in War (1957).  The role of Julian, with its unusual combination of cool smarts and calculated malevolence, became one of Robert Keith’s finest performances.

Eli Wallach in THE LINEUP
Eli Wallach in THE LINEUP

Julian’s biggest challenge is operating with a psychotic partner (Wallach’s Dancer) who is ready to explode in violence at any moment.  Wallach was a great movie character actor who had the gift of packing maximum entertainment value into any role.  Movie fans will probably best remember him for two bandito bad guys – Cavela in The Magnificent Seven and Tuco in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.  But here he is, just three years after his feature film debut in Baby Doll, and Wallach is seething with intensity as he gives pychopathy an especially bad name.

To make their situation even edgier, Julian and Dancer have hired a local getaway driver  (the ever reliable character actor Richard Jaeckel) who is a raging alcoholic.

There isn’t any lineup of note in The Lineup, which was a theatrical feature seeking to exploit a police procedural TV series of the same name, hence the reference to “30 million fans” in the trailer.  Warner Anderson co-starred in the series and plays the cop in the movie.  The real juice in this movie, however, comes from the criminals that he is chasing.

The Lineup was brilliantly directed by the grievously underrated Don Siegel.  Siegel was a master of crime movies (and was the primary filmmaking mentor to Clint Eastwood).  I particularly love Siegel’s 1973 neo-noir Charley Varrick, the guilty pleasure Two Mules for Sister Sara and John Wayne’s goodbye: The ShootistThe Lineup is right up there with Siegel’s best.

THE LINEUP
THE LINEUP

The biggest star of The Lineup, however, is the San Francisco of the late 1950s. The Lineup starts on the waterfront and ends in a chase that careens from the Cliff House all across the city to the then unfinished Embarcadero Freeway (now itself torn down decades ago). The story also takes us to the old Embarcadero YMCA, the Golden Gate Bridge, War Memorial Opera House, US Custom House, Nob Hill, Russian Hill, Legion of Honor, the old DeYoung Museum and the Mark Hopkins Hotel.  There’s even a critical scene in the Sutro Baths – which had become an ice skating rink when the movie was filmed.

Richard Jaeckel, Mary LaRoche, Cindy Calloway, Eli Wallach and Robert Keith in THE LINEUP
Richard Jaeckel, Mary LaRoche, Cindy Calloway, Eli Wallach and Robert Keith in THE LINEUP (the Bay Bridge and Yerba Buena Island in the background)
The unfinished Embarcadero Freeway in THE LINEUP
The unfinished Embarcadero Freeway in THE LINEUP

The Lineup (one of the few DVDs that I still own) plays occasionally on Turner Classic Movies and is available to rent on DVD from Netflix.

DVD/Stream of the Week: THE SECRET IN THEIR EYES – see the real Oscar winner before the Hollywood version

Ricardo Darin in THE SECRET IN THEIR EYES
Ricardo Darin in THE SECRET IN THEIR EYES

The superb The Secret in Their Eyes (El Secreto de Sus Ojos) won the 2010 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Picture. The Hollywood remake is coming out this weekend, but you should first see the original. The Secret in Their Eyes is a police procedural set in Argentina with two breathtaking plot twists, original characters, a mature romance and one forehead-slapping, “how did they do it?” shot. The story centers on a murder in Argentina’s politically turbulent 1970s, but most of the story takes place twenty years later when a retired cop revisits the murder.

Veteran Argentine actor Ricardo Darin shines once again in a Joe Mantegna-type role. Darin leads an excellent cast, including Guillermo Francella, who brings alive the character of Darin’s drunk assistant. Darin’s detective is a solitary guy who retracts into his lair to bang away at a novel. He has feelings for his boss, a tough judge played by Soledad Villamil. Her career and her personal life can’t wait for the detective to get his own stuff together. All three characters throw themselves into solving the murder and, when stymied, are all scarred by the lack of resolution.

The movie is titled after one element that I hadn’t seen before in a crime movie. And then there are the major plot twists. The final one is a jaw-dropper.

Director Juan Jose Campanella received justifiable praise for the amazing shot of a police search in a filled and frenzied soccer stadium. It ranks as one of the great single shots of extremely long duration, right up there with the opening sequence of Touch of Evil, the kitchen entrance in Goodfellas and the battle scene in Children of Men. This shot alone makes watching the movie worthwhile.

Filmmaker Billy Ray has remade the Argentine film as Secret in Their Eyes, to be released October 23 starring Nicole Kidman, Julia Roberts and Chiwetelu Ejiofor. Ray is no hack – he’s adapted the screenplays for Shattered Glass (which he also directed), Captain Phillips and the first The Hunger Games. The plot has been turned into a story about thee US federal law enforcement officials and the murder of one of their children; unfortunately, the trailer looks more like a plot-driven Law & Order, with none of the characters as singular or as memorable as in the Argentine original. We shall see.

The Secret in Their Eyes is high on my Best Movies of 2010. It’s available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play, Xbox Video and Flixster.

BLACK MASS: psychopathy and ambition is a nasty combination

Joel Edgerton and Johnny Depp in BLACK MASS
Joel Edgerton and Johnny Depp in BLACK MASS

The excellent crime drama Black Mass tells the true life story of how gangster James “Whitey” Bulger built his Boston Irish gang into a major crime empire under the protection of the FBI.  As if we needed an illustrative example, Bulger is proof that psychopathy and ambition is a really nasty combination.  And, as Black Mass points out with the FBI characters, even ambition alone can prove to be a vulnerability.

Here’s what really happened:  Bulger (Johnny Depp), the ruthless leader of the Winter Hill Gang in South Boston was approached by FBI agent John Connolly (Joel Edgerton) for help in eradicating Boston’s Italian Mafia.   Connolly was as ambitious as Bulger, and the two men shared Southie  roots.  It was in Bulger’s interest to rid himself of the competition, and he parlayed Connolly’s career-climbing grasping into a de facto amnesty that allowed Bulger to expand his murderous enterprises throughout Boston and beyond – even to Florida jai alai and gun running to Northern Ireland.

It’s an amazing tale, and director Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart) tells it very well, letting Depp and Edgerton drive the story by inhabiting a pair of characters that become a toxic mixture.  With an erect swagger and some of the coldest eyes in cinema history, Johnny Depp is superb as the feral Bulger.  The trailer below includes his life lesson to a small boy around the family breakfast table that shows his world view.  When the eyes go cold, Depp’s Bulger can terrorize with a touch, a word or even just a glance.

Joel Edgerton is equally effective as the corrupted FBI agent Connolly, who uses Southie bombast and bluster to escape the snares of office politics.  Alas,  it all finally catches up to him when a new prosecutor directs fresh eyes on Boston’s crime scene.  Until recently, I’ve known Edgerton as an Australian action star (he was the the Navy Seal team leader in Zero Dark Thirty and one of the thugs in Animal Kingdom). Edgerton recently wrote, directed and stared in the excellent psychological thriller The Gift, and his performance in Black mass reinforces that he’s a very talented and versatile filmmaker.

The cast is very deep and uniformly excellent, including Julianne Nicolson, Juno Temple, Kevin Bacon, Benedict Cumberbatch, Corey Stoll (Midnight in Paris and House of Cards) and Dakota Johnson.  Besides Depp and Edgerton, three other actors popped off the screen for me:

  • Rory Cochrane plays Bulger’s partner Steve Flemmi.  Cochrane is a veteran actor whose most memorable role is probably as the pothead Slater in Dazed and Confused.  Now filled out in middle age, he plays a guy who is about half of Depp’s scenes, but says very, very little.  As they say, the best acting is reacting, and Cochrane just chews gum and observes, letting his eyes tell us what he is thinking and feeling.
  • David Harbour plays Connolly’s FBI partner, a guy who becomes entangled in a web not of his own doing.  One of the most riveting scenes in Black Mass, he becomes terrorized about, of all things, a recipe for a steak marinade.  Harbour is a reliable veteran, but this is among his very best work.
  • Peter Sarsgaard is always brilliant, and here he gets to become a tweaked out lowlife who involuntarily giggles when he thinks that getting handed a valise full of cash is a good thing when it’s not.

Black Mass is a top rate crime story very well-told.  No more and no less.

One more thing:  there is a string of up-close-and-personal murders depicted here, including two by strangulation and a host of gunshot executions.  It’s not particularly gruesome by the standards of modern crime movies, but DON’T TAKE YOUR 4-YEAR-OLD.  A couple at my screening did just that.  What are people thinking?

SICARIO: a dirty war against the narcos

Benicio Del Toro and Emily Blunt in SICARIO
Benicio Del Toro and Emily Blunt in SICARIO

In the dark crime thriller Sicario, Emily Blunt plays a fierce and skilled FBI SWAT team leader. She’s battling Mexican narcos in Phoenix when her superiors give her the chance to “volunteer” for a mysterious anti-narco detachment with a cheerfully amoral leader (Josh Brolin). It’s unclear precisely from where, in or out of the US government, this group operates, and it includes an even more shadowy figure (Benicio Del Toro).  She’s seen a lot of bad things, but, almost immediately, she is shocked at what her new team is doing.

Sicario’s premise is that the only way to make a difference in the Drug War is to shake up drug suppliers by decapitating the major drug gangs – by any means necessary.   The good guys are fighting a Dirty War themselves.  Del Toro plays one of the most hardass movie assassins in recent cinema.

Sicario is directed by Denis Villeneuve, who also directed Incendies (my #1 movie of 2011), Enemy and Prisoners.  He has a gift for the plot-driven thriller.  While taut;y paced, the overall affect of Sicario is more brooding than frenetic, consumed by the inevitability of violence and death.

Sicario looks and sounds better than it is, having been photographed by Roger Deakins (12 Oscar nominations).  The desert borderland looks ominous as well as desolate.  And there’s a night vision scene that really pops.  The music by Jóhann Jóhannsson is unusually effective in enhancing the intense, dark and volatile mood.

I haven’t been thinking about Sicario afterwards, so it isn’t a great movie, but it’s definitively a well-made and effective crime drama.

DVD/Stream of the Week: THE SECRET IN THEIR EYES – see the real Oscar winner before the Hollywood version

Ricardo Darin in THE SECRET IN THEIR EYES
Ricardo Darin in THE SECRET IN THEIR EYES

The superb The Secret in Their Eyes (El Secreto de Sus Ojos) won the 2010 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Picture. The Hollywood remake is coming out this fall, but you should first see the original. The Secret in Their Eyes is a police procedural set in Argentina with two breathtaking plot twists, original characters, a mature romance and one breathtaking, “how did they do it?” shot. The story centers on a murder in Argentina’s politically turbulent 1970s, but most of the story takes place twenty years later when a retired cop revisits the murder.

Veteran Argentine actor Ricardo Darin shines once again in a Joe Mantegna-type role. Darin leads an excellent cast, including Guillermo Francella, who brings alive the character of Darin’s drunk assistant. Darin’s detective is a solitary guy who retracts into his lair to bang away at a novel. He has feelings for his boss, a tough judge played by Soledad Villamil. Her career and her personal life can’t wait for the detective to get his own stuff together. All three characters throw themselves into solving the murder and, when stymied, are all scarred by the lack of resolution.

The movie is titled after one element that I hadn’t seen before in a crime movie.  And then there are the major plot twists.  The final one is a jaw-dropper.

Director Juan Jose Campanella received justifiable praise for the amazing shot of a police search in a filled and frenzied soccer stadium. It ranks as one of the great single shots of extremely long duration, right up there with the opening sequence of Touch of Evil, the kitchen entrance in Goodfellas and the battle scene in Children of Men. This shot alone makes watching the movie worthwhile.

Filmmaker Billy Ray has remade the Argentine film as Secret in Their Eyes, to be released October 23 starring Nicole Kidman, Julia Roberts and Chiwetelu Ejiofor. Ray is no hack – he’s adapted the screenplays for Shattered Glass (which he also directed), Captain Phillips and the first The Hunger Games. The plot has been turned into a story about thee US federal law enforcement officials and the murder of one of their children; unfortunately, the trailer looks more like a plot-driven Law & Order, with none of the characters as singular or as memorable as in the Argentine original. We shall see.

The Secret in Their Eyes is high on my Best Movies of 2010. It’s available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play, Xbox Video and Flixster.

DVD/Stream of the Week: Outrage Beyond

Takeshi Kitano dares a Yakuza to shoot him in OUTRAGE BEYOND

Takeshi Kitano returns to star in the Japanese gangster movie Outrage Beyond. It’s a sequel to writer-director Kitano’s 2011 Outrage, of which I wrote:

If you’re looking for a hardass gangster movie with deliciously bad people doing acts of extreme violence upon each other, Outrage is the film for you. But what makes Outrage stand out is the pace and stylishness of all the nastiness, as if Quentin Tarantino had made Goodfellas (only without all the extra dialogue about foot rubs and the Royale with cheese)…Kitano, much like Charles Bronson, has the worn and rough face of a man who has seen too much disappointment and brutality.

Outrage was more of a tragic noir, because you know that most of the characters probably won’t survive – and they know it, too. There is less foreboding in Outrage Beyond, which is just glorious exploitation – gangster mayhem splattering the streets. Because this is a Yakuza film, Kitano delivers the minimum one full body tattoo and one severed finger. But he also makes ingeniously lethal use of a pitching machine in a batting cage, and “Let’s play baseball” is the cruelest line in the film.

I saw Outrage Beyond at the San Francisco International Film Festival. It’s now available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, Google Play and XBOX Video.

The Outfit: Robert Duvall, Linda Black and Joe Don Baker on the loose in the 70s

Robert Duvall in THE OUTFIT
Robert Duvall in THE OUTFIT

The Outfit (1974) is a revenge/crime story starring Robert Duvall as a bank robber released from prison who starts a campaign of terror against the crime syndicate that killed his brother.  It turns out that Duvall’s gang robbed a bank that, unbeknownst to them, was mob-owned.

The Outfit is well acted by Duvall (of course) and his fellow 70s stars Linda Black, Joe Don Baker and Bill McKinney (Deliverance and Worst Movie Teeth).  Black delivers one of her patented 70s lovable floozies, defined by a concoction of shopworn sexiness, bad luck and unreliability.  Baker is especially appealing as Duvall’s buddy.

The cast also stands out for its crew of 1950s film noir veterans:  Robert Ryan (mob kingpin), Timothy Carey (chief henchman), Jane Greer, Elisha Cook Jr and Marie Windsor.  Then there’s the dependable Richard Jaeckel, whose career bridged the decades. Joanna Cassidy plays Ryan’s bimbo du moment.

Duvall pisses off Timothy Carey in THE OUTFIT

I was most pleasantly surprised by the directing of John Flynn, who directed a handful of otherwise pedestrian crime films and action vehicles for Sly Stallone, Jan Michael Vincent and even Steven Seagal.  Flynn also did have a knack for working with good actors (James Woods, Tommy Lee Jones, Ned Beatty, Frank Langella, Danny Aiello, Brian Dennehy).

In The Outfit, Flynn shows himself to be a master of the stationary camera, the long shot and off-screen action.  The movie opens with a driver stopping at a remote gas station and getting out of the car to approach the attendant.  We see what happens in a single shot from roadside, outside the car, looking through the passenger side window and then again through the driver’s side window toward the gas station.  We see that there’s another man in the back seat, but we can’t identify him.  We only hear the ordinary music on the car radio. Still, we can tell that the driver is asking directions, and we sense that the two men in the car are up to no good.

The two men find their destination, and it turns out that they are hit men.  We see them sneaking into position around a home while the dog barks, and then we see them fire shots.  We don’t see the victim getting splattered.  We just see the dog barking his warning while we are hearing the shots.  Then the dog becomes agitated and whines.  Finally, in long shot, we see the victim prone.  It’s another very effective sequence.

Late in the story, we first sense that something has happened to Linda Black when we see the look in Joe Don Baker’s eyes in his rear view mirror.

The Outfit’s story is a little dated (not as violent as today’s crime films), but Duvall and Baker make for an appealing duo, and Flynn gives the film an interesting look. The Outfit plays this week on Turner Classic Movies and is available streaming from Amazon, iTunes and Vudu.

The trailer slaps together every scene with a gun to make The Outfit look like too much like a shoot ’em up, but it does include a great line reading from Timothy Carey.

DVD/Stream of the Week: Ain’t Them Bodies Saints

AIN’T THEM BODIES SAINTS

The skeleton of the story in Ain’t Them Bodies Saints is simple – a Texas prison escapee goes looking for his wife and kid. But that capsule understates the totality of Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, an atmospheric romantic drama that is superbly written, directed, acted and scored.

Every filmmaker should watch the first ten minutes of Ain’t Them Bodies Saints for its extremely economic story-telling, which lets the audience piece together the setting and the cores of the characters without obvious exposition. Bob and Ruth are young lovers, and Ruth is pregnant. They are involved in a crime, for which Bob goes to prison before their child is born. When the daughter is four, he escapes from prison and everyone – Ruth, Bob’s old crime partners, the community and the cops – know that he’s headed back to Ruth. Both the cops and the criminals are awaiting – the story follows the path to the inevitable conflict.

The characters are unforgettable. Bob, played with ferocity by Casey Affleck (Gone Baby Gone and The Assassination of Jesse James blah blah), has an obsession to reunite with Ruth and the daughter he has never seen. He has framed this quest as his moral obligation to take care of his family – but, of course, they would be better off without him and the trouble he will bring. He’s not really capable of nobility, but he doesn’t know that.

Ruth has a profound passion for Bob, and she owes him for taking the fall for her. But, despite her loyalty, she is entirely realistic about the consequences of his return. We see Ruth’s steely determination and wilfulness in yet another searing performance by Rooney Mara (The Social Network, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo).

The complexity of the secondary characters contribute to the compelling story. With an unsettling mixture of decency and creepiness, the local cop (Ben Foster, equally good in The Messenger and Rampart) becomes very attentive to Ruth and her daughter. He had been wounded at Bob and Ruth’s capture, seems to be genuinely interested in the welfare of the little daughter and also clearly has a thing for Ruth.

Ruth has also been helped by a fatherly gentleman storekeeper (Keith Carradine), whom we later learn is the local crime lord. His actions seem rooted in all the right values, but, given his criminality, how benevolent can he really be? As a leading man, Carradine had an impressive run in the 70s where he starred in Robert Altman’s Nashville, Ridley Scott’s The Duellists and Louis Malle’s Pretty Baby, all within three years. Now with 128 screen credits, Carradine’s performance here perfectly strikes every note.

Ain’t Them Bodies Saints looks beautiful – much like a Terence Malick film without all the confusion and boring parts. I also liked Daniel Hart’s atmospheric but unobtrusive music.

Ain’t Them Bodies Saints is completely absorbing – and that doesn’t happen by accident. This is writer-director David Lowery’s first feature with a theatrical release. Who is this guy? Lowery edited two recent indies that I criticized for other reasons, Upstream Color and Sun Don’t Shine, but in which his editing was remarkable. It’s clear from Ain’t Them Bodies Saints that Lowery is a major talent.

So there you have it – a gripping story with brilliant performances by Rooney, Affleck, Carradine and Ben Foster in the debut of a promising filmmaker.

What does the title mean? I have no idea. And I hope that Lowery lets someone else name his next exceptional movie.

Ain’t Them Bodies Saints is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Sundance Now and XBOX.

Ain’t Them Bodies Saints: absorbing and unforgettable

AIN’T THEM BODIES SAINTS

The skeleton of the story in Ain’t Them Bodies Saints is simple – a Texas prison escapee goes looking for his wife and kid.  But that capsule understates the totality of Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, an atmospheric romantic drama that is superbly written, directed, acted and scored.

Every filmmaker should watch the first ten minutes of Ain’t Them Bodies Saints for its extremely economic story-telling, which lets the audience piece together the setting and the cores of the characters without obvious exposition.  Bob and Ruth are young lovers, and Ruth is pregnant.   They are involved in a crime, for which Bob goes to prison before their child is born.  When the daughter is four, he escapes from prison and everyone – Ruth, Bob’s old crime partners, the community and the cops – know that he’s headed back to Ruth.  Both the cops and the criminals are awaiting – the story follows the path to the inevitable conflict.

The characters are unforgettable.   Bob, played with ferocity by Casey Affleck (Gone Baby Gone and The Assassination of Jesse James blah blah), has an obsession to reunite with Ruth and the daughter he has never seen.  He has framed this quest as his moral obligation to take care of his family – but, of course, they would be better off without him and the trouble he will bring.  He’s not really capable of nobility, but he doesn’t know that.

Ruth has a profound passion for Bob, and she owes him for taking the fall for her. But, despite her loyalty, she is entirely realistic about the consequences of his return.  We see Ruth’s steely determination and wilfulness in yet another searing performance by Rooney Mara (The Social Network, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo).

The complexity of the secondary characters contribute to the compelling story.  With an unsettling mixture of decency and creepiness, the local cop (Ben Foster, equally good in The Messenger and Rampart)  becomes very attentive to Ruth and her daughter.  He had been wounded at Bob and Ruth’s capture, seems to be genuinely interested in the welfare of the little daughter and also clearly has a thing for Ruth.

Ruth has also been helped by a fatherly gentleman storekeeper (Keith Carradine), whom we later learn is the local crime lord.  His actions seem rooted in all the right values, but, given his criminality, how benevolent can he really be?  As a leading man, Carradine had an impressive run in the 70s where he starred in Robert Altman’s Nashville, Ridley Scott’s The Duellists and Louis Malle’s Pretty Baby, all within three years.  Now with 128 screen credits, Carradine’s performance here perfectly strikes every note.

Ain’t Them Bodies Saints looks beautiful – much like a Terence Malick film without all the confusion and boring parts.  I also liked Daniel Hart’s atmospheric but unobtrusive music.

Ain’t Them Bodies Saints is completely absorbing – and that doesn’t happen by accident.  This is writer-director David Lowery’s first feature with a theatrical release.  Who is this guy?  Lowery edited two recent indies that I criticized for other reasons, Upstream Color and Sun Don’t Shine, but in which his editing was remarkable.  It’s clear from Ain’t Them Bodies Saints that Lowery is a major talent.

So there you have it – a gripping story with brilliant performances by Rooney, Affleck, Carradine and Ben Foster in the debut of a promising filmmaker.

What does the title mean?  I have no idea.  And I hope that Lowery lets someone else name his next exceptional movie.

Pieta: sickening violence

PIETA

Here’s proof that it’s possible for a movie to be too dark and violent even for The Movie Gourmet.

Pieta is about a 30-year-old Korean loan shark so heartless that he cripples his unpaying clients and steals their disability payoffs.  Out of nowhere, a woman finds him and claims to be the mother that abandoned him as an infant.  To test whether she is really his mother, he brutalizes and defiles her (in ways that I wish I had not witnessed).  Nevertheless she clings to him, and a heaping portion of maternal guilt causes him to rethink his ways.

Now my taste in film runs to the violent.  I revel in Killer Joe and Django Unchained and have just praised the exploitation films Outrage and Outrage Beyond.  Very violent movies like End of Watch, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Sin Nombre and Gomorrah have all recently made it on to my Best of the Year lists.  I particularly like the often grim and twisted offerings of contemporary Korean cinema (Memories of Murder, Mother, Oldboy, The Housemaid).

But I don’t like torture porn (which Pieta approaches) or slasher cinema.  And some stories – like Pieta’s –  just don’t have a payoff that makes it worthwhile to sit through the most uncomfortable screen violence.  Call me a sissy.

Pieta has received some critical praise because it is well made and emotionally powerful.  But that just isn’t enough to justify such sickening violence.  Pieta is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from some VOD outlets.